On April 30th, 1993 CERN released the technology behind the World Wide Web into the public domain for all of us to use without paying royalties. It was a glorious day, and we're going to celebrate with pictures both about the web and made possible by the web. So meta.

You may know CERN as the scientists playing smashy smashy with atoms in the Large Hadron Collider until they found the Higgs Boson. But Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his team at CERN also developed the World Wide Web, which isn't the internet itself but rather the tubes with which we find all those cat pictures. They invented it in 1991, and Berners-Lee developed a version which could send photos the next year. The first picture uploaded to the World Wide Web was this one back in July of 1992.

In a celebration of the web's proud history, the CERN team has started up a new project to revive the very first website at its original URL. A 1992 copy of the spartan web page — describing what the web was and how it could be used — had already been available on the W3C servers, but now it's back at its original location. Alongside the website restoration, CERN aims to dig up and preserve all digital assets associated with the inception of the web, with the ultimate goal being to turn info.CERN.ch into a historical archive for future generations. [The Verge]

I was using a text-based version of the web in the Fall of '93. It was mindblowing at the time, yet hilariously quaint compared to the internet of today. If I would have seen any of the GIFs below on a computer screen back in '93, pants would need changing. We're so lucky, you guys.

Why, it seems like only yesterday (1990, in point of fact) that I got my blazingly fast 1200 baud speed modem for my Tandy that I had to boot with DOS every time I started it up. The delights of Compuserve and Prodigy awaited…

I suppose I should stress that “delights” was intended to be a little facetious. Never got into the BBS’s – a week or so after getting my modem, my oldest daughter was born. My life was radically changed from then on.

Can I just say for the record that I’m glad there wasn’t an internet when I was a teenager. Yeah, sure there were those board thingies, but it was mostly rich or spoiled kids that had computers in the 80’s because they were so expensive.

My father brought home an IBM XT so he could do work from home otherwise I would have never had experienced those board thingies aka BBS’s. I also taught myself to program basic on it and am now employed as a computer programmer. That being said, I really am glad most of my early childhood was without a computer and I kind of fear for this next generation.